Pages

Monday, December 3, 2018

Alan Longbon — Trump Trade War Is A Sideshow: Part 6

The "free trade agreements" have little to do with tariffs and can be better described as "investor rights agreements" in that their main purpose is to shield companies from sovereign law. Laws are designed to protect a nation from environmental and labor abuses, and that might otherwise impinge on profits. The beneficiaries of the agreements are not so much the nations as the elite business owner class in each country. The opulent minority. Free trade in the sense that private companies are free from national government regulation that might control the formation of monopolies, oligarchies, environmental and labor protections....

The following is an appraisal of populist reaction to elite overreach.

Accordingly, populism – including the populism of the “yellow vests” – can be viewed as a retaliatory uprising of the people against the elites, who have completely lost their connection with society. The elites have built their own world in which double standards, norms of political correctness, liberal demagogy reign.

According to these “new elites”, the people and society, in their current state, have no place in this world....